Joseph Bottum

"The defense of life," declares Princeton University’s Robert P. George, "calls America back to the founding principles of our regime and to reflection on the justifying point and purposes of law and government."That was in last month’s Erasmus Lecture, the annual . . . . Continue Reading »

Christmas has devoured Advent, gobbled it up with the turkey giblets and the goblets of seasonal ale. Every secularized holiday, of course, tends to lose the context it had in the liturgical year. Across the nation, even in many churches, Easter has hopped across Lent, Halloween has frightened away . . . . Continue Reading »

God gives all He has to give—His son to speak that one word, Live. — Joseph Bottum  The Raising of Lazarus by Léon Bonnat. Image . . . . Continue Reading »

If the news of major breakthroughs in cell research should turn out to be correct, we are about to witness something like victory in the fight over embryonic stem cells.And that will open a nest of interesting questions, beginning with this one: All those editorialists and columnists who have, over . . . . Continue Reading »

The December issue of First Things has just appeared, the first of the Yuletide deliveries to arrive and mark the beginning of the Christmas season.Well, maybe not, since the issue contains a short piece from me called “The End of Advent,” which bemoans the omnipresence of Christmas: . . . . Continue Reading »

Nat Hentoff From the beginning, so very long ago, of the 2008 presidential campaign, many of the horde of self-proclaimed independent journalists reported that the Democrats were strategically moving toward the center, seeking some sort of common ground even with pro-lifers. Yet, when the Supreme . . . . Continue Reading »

“Expansive and yet vacuous is the prose of Kahlil Gibran,” writes Alan Jacobs in the new issue of First Things . And weary grows the mind doomed to read it. The hours of my penance lengthen, The penance established for me by the editor of this magazine, And those hours may be numbered as . . . . Continue Reading »

The October issue of First Things is out, at last. I’ve spent the morning browsing in it, and I’ve just about decided that my favorite pages are where Richard John Neuhaus takes up, in his monthly column The Public Square , the pope’s much-discussed motu proprio on the Latin Mass, . . . . Continue Reading »

In his June/July First Things article, " Remembering the Secular Age ," along with emails he’s been sending us over the past few months, Michael Novak has been tracking the claim that atheism is back. Or so, at least, you might imagine from all the figures in recent months, one after . . . . Continue Reading »

Here at First Things , we’ve managed, more or less, to avoid talking about the new atheism tracts that seem to have infected the blogs and the bestseller lists. Partly because they’re so bad. And partly because they’re so old-fashioned, as though their authors had rediscovered a . . . . Continue Reading »